My dear son,
You will not remember the first sound you made. No one does. But I do. It was small, cracked, almost unwilling. Like the world had to persuade you to take that first breath. I stood there waiting for it. And when it came, it was not triumphant.
It was human.
That sound has never left me. It lives behind everything you’ve said since. I have carried it the way one carries a lamp through fog — unsure of the ground, still moving forward.
When I think of you now, grown and restless, I hear that first cry again, except softer. You are searching for your own air, testing what it means to breathe in a world that does not promise mercy. The world will not explain itself to you. It will not make sense, not entirely. It is a place of moving shadows, half-answers, and hunger dressed in fine clothes. Yet, even there, meaning is possible. Maybe not clarity, but something like direction.
You once asked me if I believed in God. I told you I did, which was true. It is this belief that steadies me still. It is the memory of faith, worn and scarred, the kind that continues to move even after its knees give way. I tell you this because of that name that has followed me since forever — Chimamanda. If my mother were alive today, she would have taught me this word, though I am not her. She wanted the word to live on, even in a man. My God will not fail me. I have spent my life testing the truth of it. Sometimes I think it is true only because we must act as if it is. Faith, son, is the effort to keep walking when there is no clear road.
You live in a time where everyone pretends certainty is strength. They speak of goals and progress, of dreams made solid on screens and resumes. But certainty is a fragile god. It cracks in the rain. It cannot hold grief or the silence that follows it. You will learn this when you lose someone you love — not by distance, but by death or misunderstanding. That is when you will see what it means to keep living without a guarantee.
When I was your age, I mistook endurance for strength. I thought surviving was enough. There is a kind of dignity in simply not falling, yes, but it is a cold dignity. Over the years, I learned that to endure is only half of living. The other half is to remain open, to stay permeable to joy, to kindness, even to foolish hope. These things will try to slip away from you as the years gather. Hold them. They make the weight bearable.
Beckett once wrote that we go on because there is no other choice. He was right, but that is not the whole story. We go on with meaning, even if it’s meaning we invent to stay upright. There is a strange nobility in that — inventing reasons when none are given. That is faith, stripped of religion, naked and raw. Maybe that is what my name was always hinting at.
My father never spoke to me of his pain. Men of his time mistook silence for wisdom. He built walls instead of sentences. I inherited both. It took half a lifetime to realize walls do not protect; they isolate. You build them high, thinking they will keep the world out, but eventually you find they only keep you in. So I write this letter as a small act of defiance against his kind of silence. I write because you deserve a father who tells the truth — not to punish, but to prepare.
You will fail many times. Some failures will carve you open; others will whisper and rot quietly inside you. The first impulse will be to hide them. Everyone does. But do not. Failure, for all its stink and heaviness, holds something clean beneath it. It strips pretense. It reminds you of limits, but also of possibility. To fail honestly is to risk becoming fully human.
When I was twenty-five, I believed the world owed me recognition. I waited for proof that my life mattered. It never came. And in that long waiting, I almost forgot how to live without it. But one night, sitting under a weak light in a small room, I whispered the name. Chimamanda. Not as a prayer. Not as command. Just a reminder: my God will not fail me. I did not mean it as triumph. I meant it as endurance. I kept saying it until it sounded less like a declaration and more like breath. My faith shrank that night, small enough to fit inside an ordinary day — the kind of faith that does not need spectacle to survive.
You might think faith is fire. Sometimes it is. But more often it’s ash — the quiet warmth that remains after the bright ends. That warmth, however small, is enough to keep you human. Remember that.
You once told me you wanted to change the world. A noble dream. I admire it. But remember, the world changes you faster than you change it. Do not resist this too fiercely. Let the world mark you. Let it move you through its seasons of loss and grace. Meaning grows from the dirt of ordinary things: a hand held longer than needed, a hard truth spoken gently, the persistence to rise again after shame. These are the small fires we live by.
Like Beckett’s characters, you will be tempted to wait for clarity, for the ideal moment when everything aligns. That moment does not exist. Begin anyway. Love anyway. Fail anyway. This is your act of courage. The world owes you nothing, but that does not absolve you from giving. To give without purpose, to build without certainty — this is how quiet revolutions begin.
I did not learn this easily. There were nights when I spoke the name as if it were a curse. When the idea of an unfailing God seemed cruel. Those nights have their place too. They polish you in strange ways. You wake from them less hungry for control. You learn to live with mystery, not as an enemy, but as an old neighbor who never leaves. In that proximity, humility grows.
Now I am older. My hands tremble, not yet from age, but from the tremor of remembering. I write this letter not to instruct, but to leave a trace. If one sentence survives longer than me, let it be this: Faith is not certainty; it is stubborn trust in the face of silence. You may forget everything else. That, I hope, you will remember.
Chimamanda — the name itself feels like breath made into promise. Not a loud one, not a spectacle, but a steady whisper in the throat of time. The world will fail you in small ways every day. People will fail you, I will too. But this name, this idea, carries within it the quiet refusal to let disappointment be the final word. It means that even when you sit in the wreckage, there is still a pulse under the rubble, still a reason to rise.
You, son, are not bound to the faith of your ancestors, but you are invited to its endurance. That is the inheritance worth keeping — not doctrine, but persistence. The willingness to stay close to the human pulse, no matter how faint. You will lose and forget, fall and recover. You will doubt. You will grieve. But somewhere between those acts, you will live. And if I have taught you anything, let it be this: even in the smallest life, there is room for eternity to whisper.
I hope you read this not as instruction but as companionship. You and I are traveling the same crooked road, just at different points. There will be days when you think I did not understand you, and you will be right. There will be others when you miss my voice, and I will wish I had spoken more plainly. That is the broken dialogue of fathers and sons — always half-heard, always incomplete. But underneath it all, love persists. Not the sentimental kind, but the quiet, durable kind that hides inside attention.
Tonight I imagine you sitting somewhere, thinking of your own name, wondering what it might mean. I imagine you laughing, or silent, or angry at something that refuses to bend. I will not tell you to pray, but I will tell you to notice. Notice what endures despite everything. Notice the small mercies that keep returning. That is where God hides — not in victory, but in return.
And if ever you find yourself empty, standing before a ceiling that refuses to speak back, whisper it once — not as command, not as surrender, but as memory. My God will not fail me.
Let it be the rhythm of your breath.
Let it be the sound that carries you forward, even when nothing else will.
Dad
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Rafael Rodrigues on Unsplash
